All space agencies have optical comms in their road maps. Largely they are thinking about inter satellite communications (the atmosphere causes significant issu

All space agencies have optical comms in their road maps. Largely they are thinking about inter satellite communications (the atmosphere causes significant issues when going back to earth). So the main application is to have some relay satellite that can then transmit to earth via RF. The application is not mainly deep space ropes but Leo or meo satellites, the typically only have very short transit times over the ground stations, so can't get all their measurement data down. By using e.g. a geo relay they can transmit lots of data optically and the geo relay can more slowly transmit the data to earth until the leo satellite comes back in view.